Kindle Notes & Highlights
He was also extremely knowledgeable about the numerical issues involved in intonation, which he shared with me.
it was he who taught me to listen carefully to the resonant vibration of unbowed strings to vastly improve my intonation.
I have a friend who’s an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don’t agree with. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is”, and I’ll agree. But then he’ll say, “I, as an artist can see how beautiful it is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull.” I think he’s nutty.
The human mind cannot absorb and integrate all the information that is transmitted to it by the senses.
“If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, then it is science. If it is communicated through forms whose constructions are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively, then it is art”.
Most significantly, it was recognized long ago that pleasurable music is connected with ratios of small integers.
He blew them and made their tone the starting note, the huang chung, of the scale. (The huang chung had the same pitch as Ling Lun’s voice when he spoke without passion.)
The coincidence between what was considered esthetically pleasing musically and the role of ratios of small integers and hence mathematics, or as the sixth century AD Roman philosopher Boethius put it, the coincidence between “sensus and ratio” (senses and reason) had a significant, meaningful effect on people.
The color can be specified in terms of what is referred to as the spectral intensity.
Essentially, music and color are subjective manifestations of the corresponding objective physical phenomena – sound and light, respectively.
We say that the wave is transverse, here meaning perpendicular.
Imagine what would happen if you were to move your hand forward suddenly. You would compress the air immediately in front of your hand. That compressed region of air would compress the air immediately in front of it. This process will continue as in the case of a pulse propagating along a stretched string. You will have produced a sound pulse.
The wave is said to be longitudinal, meaning that the motion of the air is along the same direction as the direction of propagation of the disturbance.
The development of scales is a fascinating story of the interdependence of scientific understanding and esthetics.
